In this Tuesday, July 7, 2015 file photo immigrants from El Salvador and Guatemala who entered the country illegally board a bus after they were released from a family detention center in San Antonio. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Romeo Eudagio tossed in bed in his upstairs bedroom the night before his junior high school graduation.

His blue and white school uniform sat pressed and ready for the next day’s ceremony. Early that morning, as Romeo’s 32-year old mother was cooking for him, his father walked in and pointed a gun at her.

Arguments and fights were not new. She tried to run but he quickly shot at her.

“I saw her fall. My father was about to shoot me and I just left running,” he said softly. “At this moment my life changed. I was alone. It was just me and my brother and sister.”

Romeo never returned home. His father, who had owned a local mini-market, was later arrested but that moment was the last time he saw his father.

Why did his father kill his mother? Romeo said: “There are many questions but few answers.”

His story unfolded against the backdrop of one of the most violent countries in the world, El Salvador, where he, like thousands of children, fled last year arriving at the U.S. southwest border alone, traumatized, scared and thrust into a foreign and unwelcoming world.

They fled not for economic reasons, but for their lives amid spiraling gang violence and a corroded justice system. Today they are struggling to adjust to a system that wasn’t prepared for them and a past that haunts them.

These children should not be forgotten.

Romeo’s mother died Nov. 25, 2013, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. That year, the Organization of Salvadorean Women for Peace, reported 215 femicides in the small country, among the highest rates in the world.

The UN Refugee Agency recently warned of a looming crisis of Central American female refugees as criminal armed groups continue to take over neighborhoods, threatening, raping and assaulting women with little intervention from police who are often in collusion.

There are 80,000 children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras who have arrived at the U.S. border alone since October 2013. Like their mothers, they are helpless against assault in their own land. These are not just statistics, these are lives.

Romeo wound up more than 30 miles from his home in San Salvador at his aunt’s house in a central city to the east, San Vincente, where the notorious MS13 gang had control. The gang gave him a choice of being killed or coming to their side.

Given those bleak options, Romeo and seven other cousins all under age 25 headed to the Guatemala border to find a coyote, someone who could help them cross into the U.S. Family members were scattered across the states and they could find safety there.

A cousin riding next to Romeo cried for much of the hours-long trip, wailing that she would never see her family again.

For weeks Romeo was locked up in drop house after drop house in Mexico, until a coyote finally brought them to the U.S.’s southwest border and he turned himself over to border patrol.

Last summer media attention swirled around child migrants from Central America, many of them with stories like Romeo’s.

Pictures of children crammed onto concrete floors at a Texas detention center often accompanied news reports. Then there was hand wringing about where these children would be placed and which of them would be deported. Republicans groaned it was President Obama’s fault for being too lenient on immigrants.

Obama called it a humanitarian crisis and then his administration eventually asked Mexico to crack down on migrants at its border, hoping the problem wouldn’t return. But violence continued to spiral upwards in Central America. The problem is hardly solved.

Youth deported turned up dead in their hometowns and the situation worsened at the Mexico-Guatemala border.

As for Romeo, after some weeks in detention, first in Arizona and then Florida, he moved in with an aunt in Los Angeles. He had never met her and the two often are at odds.

Today, he is 18 years old and until recently was a sophomore at Augustus F. Hawkins High School in a largely immigrant neighborhood in Los Angeles. But his aunt is pressuring him to pay rent and hasn’t been able to get to school consistently.

Memories of El Salvador and his family fill his head constantly.

He would rather be working with his cousins in construction so he can send the money back to his siblings. Until then, he spends time at Homies Unidos, an anti-violence group run by a former gang member who is pushing him to finish high school.

Earlier this year, a judge granted Romeo legal status because he had no parents. It’s a small victory that will allow him to find a job. But he is among the few — tens of thousands of cases are still pending and about 8,000 have orders of deportation.

When I meet him, he’s rapping with his friends and talking about girls, like most teenagers. But as he recounts the past few years, his sentences shorten.

At such a young age, I can’t imagine there was anything in his short life that has equipped him for these experiences. He can’t afford a phone card to call his 14-year-old sister or 8-year-old brother. Sweat dripped down his forehead in the air conditioned room as he talked about the family he once had.

The loss of parents, the loss of home, the loss of stability, the loss of control. It all hung over the conversation.

Before we finished, he told me that another one of his cousins back home was killed by police recently. He’s not sure of the motivation, but corruption is rampant in the country’s broken justice system.

Still, Romeo doesn’t want anyone to paint his life, his homeland like so many have — as a current of violence that’s enveloped a family, a history, a culture. It’s more beautiful than that, he says. If only he could go back to that place. But that place is gone. He can’t return home.

Rachel Uranga is a member of the Los Angeles News Group editorial board. rachel.uranga@langnews.com

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